Multinational Telecommunications Company
With over 277 million subscribers, 80 million+ landlines, and operations in 18 different countries, this telecommunications company is now one of the largest companies in this industry.
This company came to be after the merger of several smaller operations and has since committed to providing customers with products and services of the highest quality in television, cellular networks, and broadband internet.
The Challenge
This company experienced many challenges within different areas of their operations, such as:
- Agencies: This company only had a Queue Management System in only two out of the 18 countries it was present in. The functionality of this system was limited to only providing generalized service times and wait-times for consumers. There was no way to personalize the system, only to organize people on a first-come, first-serve basis. Further, while its ability to gather customer feedback regarding the quality of services was ideal, it lacked the ability to generate comprehensive reports on staff productivity.
- Call Center: An in-house tool had been developed, but it only provided information about the number of calls and the service required. There were no specializes reasons or categorizations based on the service of the call, only generalized services. They had to work with their own call centers as well as having to outsource partners.
- Back Office: There was a lack of connection between the branches and call centers, everything was managed through emails. Consequently, measuring response times, bottlenecks, or the number of cases forwarded to different areas was impossible. It was a manual process, leading to cases being lost and follow-ups never happening. There were no specialized areas within the back office to handle requests received from the agency and call center executives. Standardized and homogenized configurations existed, but due to legal circumstances or the need for customization, each country had to establish its own configurations.
- Corporate Division: None of the executives were assigned to their clients in a case tracking tool. All information management was done manually, preventing the centralization of sales or services control. Similarly, prioritization based on customer category couldn't be achieved
The most significant challenge was to optimize and automate processes within and between the aforementioned areas, using a tool that would provide 360° information on cases as they moved across different departments.
The Solution
By partnering with ACF Technologies in 2010, a digital transformation process was initiated. Agents were specialized according to their roles (sales, customer service, technical area) through the implementation of Q-Flow BPM across branches, including corporate divisions, call centers, and back office.
- Over 650 branches, including both owned agencies and distributors
- Approximately 45 to 50 in-house call centers, along with outsourcing
- More than 270 back-office areas
Customers were segmented based on the purpose of their visit or call, enabling the establishment of classifications or reasons for attention for each specialized service.
Diverse indicators were successfully measured, including executive productivity, service levels, abandonment rates, estimated wait times, service times, waiting queue volume, number of people served, back-office duration, executive availability concerning visits, branches, and schedules, idle time, and more.
By implementing client integration, data on visit reasons were gathered according to customer categories including general or corporate. Corporate clients were assigned to executives, and thanks to Q-Flow, a comprehensive history of interactions and sales was created for each one.
The allocation of customer portfolios to each corporate executive was implemented, ensuring that regardless of the customer's touchpoint, a single executive always handled their needs and provided follow-up on requests.
To enhance service quality and customer care, the Sense Ear module was introduced. It enabled real-time audio recordings of 100% of customer interactions and transactions with service executives at branches
Furthermore, a new department focused on agency quality was established, defining quality KPIs. This initiative facilitated the identification of strengths and weaknesses in processes, policies, and opportunities for enhancing customer service.
The Results
After working with ACF Technologies and implementing Q-Flow, this telecommunications company was able to achieve the following results:
- Improvements in service times at branches allowed them to identify and categorize short, medium, and long services, enabling them to prioritize them based on the service level of each request.
- Successful identification of service quality was achieved based on the categorization used by employees compared to the reasons entered in the central billing systems.
- Enhanced staff productivity due to control and measurement of operational efficiencies and back-office processes resulted in the optimization of resources and high levels of efficiency.
- Decreases in wait times resulted in their becoming a benchmark in the region.
- Optimized case resolution times lead to heightened customer satisfaction, resulting in a reduction from 12% to 3% in complaints management.
- Implementation of appointment scheduling for managing customer complaints and directing them to the proper service desk or person to handle dispute resolution.
- Cost savings due to improved operational efficiency in each branch.
- The use of reports enhanced customer service by identifying process improvements, policy enhancements, margins for improvement, and first-contact resolution capability, thus increasing customer retention.
- In the call centers, areas requiring more support and receiving more complaints were successfully identified, measuring recurrences, service times, etc. This also aided in identifying alerts for claims with deviating trends, enabling prompt action to address the reason for their increase.
- Thanks to the success obtained in the implementation in Central America, the project migrated to the following countries: Dominican Republic, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Ecuador. With 11 countries with the implementation of Q-Flow